Fire disaster was a good thing claims Bezos

Budget bookseller Jeff Bezos has been telling the world that the Fire Phone disaster was good for the company.

Amazon’s wizard idea to start flogging a smartphone, the Fire Phone, was a major flop that cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

But according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the Fire Phone was a “tiny little blip” compared to some of the larger experiments his company is working on now.

“If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now. And I am not kidding. And some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip,” Bezos said.

He said that the size of mistakes needed to grow along with the company, Bezos said. “If it doesn’t, you’re not going to be inventing at scale that can actually move the needle.”

The great thing is when you take this approach, a small number of winners pay for dozens, hundreds of failures. And so every single important thing that we have done has taken a lot of risk taking, perseverance, guts, and some of them have worked out, most of them have not, he said.

Other failed projects included the hotel-booking site, Amazon Destinations, and auction site, Amazon Auction. But it’s also led to massive successes, such as its Amazon Web Services and the Amazon Echo, which is why Bezos likes to call the company “the best place in the world to fail”.